Reconfigure (4 page)

Now to continue the experiment. She typed “Load Slot1” but then she retyped “Load slot1” before hitting enter to ensure the correct case matching.

A dutiful reply from RC came back to her.

@rayKonfigure

Loading slot1

Mini stars briefly reflected on the wooden floor. In an instant, pieces of the fractured mug appeared, just where they were before. This was EPIC! Roisin had goosebumps all over, the hairs on the back of her neck and arms stood to attention. She did a deliberate comedy double take shaking her head blinking and then used the inside of both fists to pretend to rub her eyes. If she could have done an actual ‘cartoon eyes on stalks Awooogah!’ She would have done that too. Normally these sorts of gestures are part of over the top body language in a group. Weird little rituals like live emojis that form amongst friends and cultural groupings. As there was no one around this was for her own amusement. It broke the tension of the immense, awesome, ridiculous discovery she had made. I mean, Roisin? With super powers? Albeit case sensitive command line driven over Twitter direct message ones? “Suit You Sir, ooo!” she said out loud.

Coffee! She needed coffee. Not any of that instant stuff either. Bean to cup time, combined with a bagel, butter and Marmite. There was a lot of exploring to do and she had some improvements in mind already. She had to figure out why this was working at all. On her way to the kitchen she let her mind wander and ponder.

“Is the entire world a virtual one, are we in a game?”

“Am I real?”

“Why me?”

“Fractal space coordinates?”

“Do I have any Marmite left?”

“Will it work if I move elsewhere?”

“Turn the toaster down or the bagel burns.”

It was always hard to keep on task, but mind wandering was a creative necessity, most of the time. Roisin tried to focus on things again and again but found it better to let go and let the solutions come to her. Despite a short journey to the kitchen her mind felt like it had pondered for hours.

She had no Marmite! Her brain already knew that, she had got a craving for it and even among the wonderful things she had to consider about the future of the World, her subconscious had surfaced, raised an exception and sent the message of doubt about the amount of Marmite available. Damn! When you want Marmite, you just gotta have Marmite. It’s the law. As she pushed the bagels in the toaster, an evil little seed of an idea germinated. As it grew it crept forward to her conscious mind like a stealthy Ninja. She ran back upstairs two steps at a time, nearly falling flat on her face as she slipped mid step.

She opened up Google Maps, there was her house dead centre. It was a suburban area, lots of other houses and a few local supermarkets, a garage and… well the rest didn’t matter. The local Tesco Express was the closest. It was showing as being 750 m away. She typed.

“Zone -S Range=<800.0,800.0,30.0>”

The reply confirmed her request.

@rayKonfigure

Zone set Human <800.0,800.0,30.0> <1.0,1.0,1.0>

Roisin was happy the current Zone had been set much wider. The Tesco is 750 m away. “No wait!” she stopped herself. Roisin realised her coordinate maths was wonky. If she was the central point and this was a bounding box, sphere or something, then 750 m from her meant the Zone value needed to be at least twice that to catch it in the bounding area. She kept z at 30 m she was pretty sure the elevation wasn’t going to be a problem but just in case she had 15 m each way up and down. She adjusted the Zone by typing.

“Zone -S Range=<1600.0,1600.0,30.0>”

RC confirmed.

@rayKonfigure

Zone set Human <1600.0,1600.0,30.0> <1.0,1.0,1.0>

“Let’s have a little look shall we?” She stated out loud. “Open wide." She was not sure why she was pretending to be a dentist. She typed to RC.

“ls Jar*”

Roisin decided, though it might get tricky, to put the * on the end. Wildcards help a lot when you need them, but in the wrong place you get a lot of results you don't want. The reply told her just how many jars there were in the large Zone around her.

@rayKonfigure

ls Jar*

1,528,204 results

Phew, at least RC knew when to cut the results down, it may have caused Twitter some grief to return Jar, Jar1 …. Jar1528204 in a long list. Another handy safeguard, thanks RC, thought Roisin. She jokingly shuddered to herself thinking that a few of those might be JarJar Binks, that was not the Jar she was looking for. She needed to type some more to narrow it down.

“grep -i ‘Marmite’ Jar”

Here we go, she thought. Roisin was now descending into the more arcane command set of Linux and alike. The idea she had was to use grep to search in the objects. She had no idea if that would work as these were not ordinary text files. There was the Examine command that did some of the deserialisation of whatever this system organisation was. She was sure Examine was not just a synonym for ‘cat’. She knew the cat command was not from the more recent Web trends that cats were cute and funny, even when grumpy, but from some long gone need to concatenate files together. Ask a system to concatenate one file with nothing else and return the result, you get the contents. It’s quick, simple and everyone does it, despite it not being quite the right use.

The response came back.

@rayKonfigure

.

Less than helpful, but maybe this a good thing, you don’t want a description of everything in the World in plain text in a file in Linux do you? That would make peoples ‘password.txt’ files look positively sensible. Roisin decided on a more detailed approach. She typed.

“Examine Jar* | grep Marmite”

Yet more Linux foo. Roisin thought it was worth taking what Examine has to offer and then pattern matching through grep via a pipe. A handy way to chain commands together and get completely lost in output in a CLI! Still if this worked it might make a good batch file, a combination she could code up to make it simpler to find things?

The returned message offered lots of information.

@rayKonfigure

Jar15

Jar223

Jar276

Jar332

Jar333

Jar401

Jar423

Jar457

Jar502

Jar505

Jar597

…

Jar630

Jar773

Jar948

Result. She was sure Marmite’s marketing department might really like this information. If Roisin had worked it out correctly, 800 meters in each direction from her there would be over two thousand other houses with jars of Marmite. The list continued but Roisin was focused on the block 597 to 630. She was pretty sure her jar was Jar15. When she set the Zone she guessed a radial search would start with her position and catalogue the contents outwards. She had a few jars in her house so a numeric suffix of 15 for the Marmite one seemed reasonable.

She checked by typing.

“Examine Jar15”

She received a reply.

@rayKonfigure

Designation - Jar

Static Composite Object

Relative Attachments

Lid

Printed Label

Contents

Marmite 0.3%

Fractal Location - <3800,70,20>

Fractal Orientation- <0,180,0>

Fractal Iteration Level - <2709>

It sure beats the old Internet Coke machine webcams. She could look for empty Marmite anywhere now. She played with the idea. Jar15 was hers, everything matched. Roisin thought the maths was a bit off. That jar was empty, no way even with the fanciest of manoeuvres with a knife or a spoon would she reclaim any of that 0.3%?

“Bye Bye!” She said as she typed.

“rm Jar15”

RC replied simply.

@rayKonfigure

Jar15

Roisin repeated the command just to make sure Jar15 had gone.

“Examine Jar* | grep Marmite”

Another reply.

@rayKonfigure

Jar223

Jar276

Jar332

Jar333

Jar401

Jar423

Jar457

Jar502

Jar505

Jar597

…

Jar630

Jar773

Jar948

The test worked, the Jar15 was gone, she didn't need to go and look at the work surface in the kitchen. After the ‘Mugshards’ test she knew the jar was no more. She had no idea where it was, but it wasn’t going to be cluttering up her recycle bin. It was good to see that the search, when re-run, had the numbering consistent, that was important. The ellipses indicated a range of jars with contiguous number patterns. That had to be Tesco, the shelf or stock room? A rich vein of Marmite? Now for the really tricky part. Come here Marmite, Roisin needs her brekky. She scrolled back through the DM with RC. When she had done the first Translate Mug it had told her it needed to be Relative or Absolute. She had gone with Relative and the second Translate had dropped it on the floor. The numbers to work out how to get Jar600, that she had picked at random, to her would be complicated if she had to do the 3D maths and vector coords. It was not impossible but it was a right pain. Absolute should be precise and an actual position could be used. She knew where Jar15 had been from the Examine, and there would be a space on her worktop ready. She tried typing.

“Translate -a Jar600 <3800,70,20>”

The DM reply scrolled into view.

@rayKonfigure

Applying Translate Jar600 <3800,70,20>

Roisin did not hear the tumbling crashing of glass, nor the work experience lad in the stock room giving out a little scream as he turned around to see Marmite labels floating on a sticky black yeasty tar puddle on the floor.

Roisin repeated her previous command.

“Examine Jar* | grep Marmite”

RC replied.

@rayKonfigure

Jar600

Jar223

Jar276

Jar332

Jar333

Jar401

Jar423

Jar457

Jar502

Jar505

JarShard

…

JarShard34

Jar601

…

Jar630

Jar773

Jar948

She looked at the return message, pleased to see Jar600 showing up top obviously closer, hopefully on her work surface next to the bagels. Breakfast will be served after all. JarShard? It fitted the wildcard of Jar*, this list was different. Oops! She must have pulled one from the wrong place. Jar600 may have been supporting a few others. She had not received any warning about things breaking? Maybe the safety checks only went to one level not a cascade? Roisin decided to clean up after herself typing.

“rm JarShard*”

RC replied, JarShards were no more.

@rayKonfigure

JarShard

…

JarShard34

Roisin did not hear the much louder screams of the work experience youth at Tesco as the broom he was using to clear up the mess glowed a little and was suddenly clean of any traces of glass, lids, labels or Marmite. All that was left was a gap on the stock shelf where Jar597 through to Jar600 had once been. To him, it was just a gap and a scary spooky mystery to tell at college next week. That was assuming he didn't get accused of stealing Marmite. He couldn't claim they broke in transit, there was no debris to show. He hated Marmite!

Roisin did some instinctive system clean up, returning this Zone to its default.

“Zone -r”

@rayKonfigure

Zone set Human <4.0,4.0,4.0> <1.0,1.0,1.0>

Everything was back to normal, except for the slightly acrid carbon smell wafting up the stairs. Roisin had burned her bagels. She leapt down the stairs to make sure the house was not alight. She binned the burned bagels, toasted some more. The coffee took a while as she had not started it before the great Marmite heist. Breakfast was definitely served. She was a little surprised the Marmite was not exactly how the old one had been. It was in the same place, except it seemed to be facing another direction. In future, assuming she carried on this sort of behaviour, she would have to ensure she copied the orientation of the object too and do a Transform with the Translate. This was like any virtual world environment, lots of things to trip you up and to get wrong once you start ‘magically’ moving things with code not with the physics engine. Still bagel, Marmite, Nom Nom!

It had been an hour since her ‘great Marmite heist’. Several caffeine infusions had made their way past the bagel and pilfered Marmite into her now settled stomach. The caffeine rush was as noticeable as ever. A little sweat formed on her top lip as the buzz kicked in. Roisin realised in her zeal to meet the Marmite fixation she had taken way more risks, typed hastily and acted with even more reckless abandon than normal. This was not a game, the World was not a game. She did not know what this RC was, or why it was. She did have an inkling of a theory. It was not her theory, as such, but one that she had contemplated and grokked a little while ago. It helps to have spent many hours in Sci-Fi, in games and in the general culture of geekiness, to consider such things. She opened a browser window and typed into G. Oh! For the good old days when it was Google, not some street punk called G.

“Yo G!” She said in a gruff voice as she typed in ‘Multiverse Theories’. Then Roisin set to re-reading what she thought she had kind of understood. There were a lot of theories. They all had a similar base idea. The Universe is not a standalone thing. There are, somehow, multiple levels or copies of the Universe and everything in it. It had been a standard alternate Universe concept used in story telling for generations. Even religious ideas of Heaven and Hell or reincarnation seem to require the existence of another unseen but parallel place. Quantum Leap, Sliders and many an episode of Star Trek, have other dimensions and levels and travel between them. Which ever way she looked at it, there seemed to be no real proof of anything. That is quite a dilemma for all the research scientists. Each passionately believes their idea, they can write papers and draw conclusions, they can calculate things with Sheldon like mathematical powers. Yet no one had a practical example of a multiverse.

Roisin read the ideas over and over. She was left with the two main concepts. The first, that if space is infinite, then an infinite number of combinations, of an infinite number of things, will lead to an infinite number of outcomes. That would include complete copies of the Universe and everything in it, from identical copies to ones that just had slight differences. It would include versions where the apes were running the Earth and humans are just slaves. Cue her obligatory “You maniacs! You blew it all to hell.” Quote out loud.

The other concept was based around Quantum Physics. Weird stuff, but it seemed to be a serious theory. An atom or electron can exist in multiple states at the same time, concurrently. The only thing that determines the actual state is probability. Or something like that! The quantum multiverse says that at each point a state is decided, a decision is made and each state will diverge. Everything, all the time, is splitting and creating new multiverses then going about their normal existence, in their own parallel planes.

It was a vertigo inducing idea either way, but she found it intriguing. It is, of course, made more intriguing by the fact Roisin could Tweet a DM to RC, and get a full jar of Marmite from somewhere 750 m away. It was quite a mental leap to suggest that being able to reconfigure the local area, break a few things into shards on a floor, and then clear them away, is proof of a multiverse in any context. She was sure the professors in the field would be really interested.

A ripple of selfishness hit Roisin. This was her find, her discovery, and she had a right to figure it out a bit more, before handing it over to some boffin types. They only wanted to see papers published with their names and keep their funding. She had always found academia a little bit odd, not as free thinking and free flowing as it should be. In many ways it was worse that the straight obvious greed of the corporations.

OK! I am going with the possibility that this is some sort of multiverse interface, she told herself. It is always good to have an idea what a system is for, and how it works, before you go tinkering with it. Tinkering was what she did best and Roisin was in full tinker mode. She did not want to cause any more breakages. Shards were on her 'no thanks’ list.

First, she wanted to make the connection to RC a little more robust. Web based RESTful interactions are not what she had in mind. She was going to put a decent user interface on this baby. It was an API (application programming interface), it responded to simple formatted text. Bye Bye CLI!